Psychic distance in The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison 

In this latest installment in my MFA critical work series, we’re looking at one of my favorite authors, Toni Morrison and one of her best works: The Bluest Eye.

Toni Morrison uses a combination of 1st person and 2nd person perspective to create psychic distance in The Bluest Eye. The writing style also creates space because Toni Morrison often informs the reader about the events in the story rather than shows it through description and dialogue. There is sparse dialogue throughout the story, as is typical of the Morrison style. We might get a conversation, but only when the child protagonists are speaking. The adults in their lives talk little. This is an exciting device that is difficult at first unless you are an experienced Toni Morrison reader who knows her style. The opening line demonstrates the perspective the reader will have in this story, “Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is beautiful.” Most writers would start their book very differently. It also calls back to the forward where Toni Morrison runs words together in a blur. 

The psychic distance is effective because we see The Bluest Eye’s world through the child protagonist’s eye. Distance is created again when she talks about how the adults relate to the children. “We don’t initiate conversations with grown-ups; we follow orders.” The psychic distance is further enforced by how the reader experiences events through the children and how they hear about them. To some degree, the storytelling is third hand. Things happen, but we don’t see it from the people who perform the actions. We see the action as the children hear about it later. We are told lines like, “The turnip pot crackled.” The only time we get direct action is when the children are out playing or visiting neighbors. 

Most chapters begin in the same manner as the beginning of the book—a dry description of something not connected to a character or an experience. We are gently pulled into the story from that sort of distance, but it is often interrupted by another simple, declarative sentence that describes something going on. No character needs to be tied to something to get something related. The environment produces sounds, sensations, smells, and sensory details that Morrison simply drops into the middle of the prose. This all adds up to psychic distance because we don’t invest in her characters the same way. We are not experiencing the story with them or through them; we are reading about it as if someone else were telling us about it. I don’t think this story could be said in a more direct manner. It wouldn’t be as elegant. Something would be lost if we were invested in the characters like in ordinary prose. We are outsiders into a unique world. 

The effect on the reader is that reading this book is like experiencing a dream. We have simultaneously pushed away from the story and pulled in. This tension goes on throughout the story of little black girls in the rural south in 1941. We can’t see all the details, but the details we do get are powerful (like the turnip pot). Because the story is told from a child’s perspective, there is a certain child-like quality of the prose and the reading experience that is so distant and yet somehow powerful. In the hands of a less clever writer, this would not work, but in the hands of Toni Morrison, it is beautiful storytelling. There is a reason this book won a Nobel Prize for literature.